(1336) IMPLEMENTATION OF BLENDED LEARNING AT THE PHD LEVEL OF STUDY ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY (UNIVERSITY OF BELGRADE)

摘要

The rapid development of information and communications technology has brought many changesand influenced greatly the way we live, work, but particularly the way we acquire new knowledge. Theincreasing use of digital tools in education accelerated and significantly advanced the process ofteaching and learning at all levels of study. Blended learning represents perhaps one of the mosteffective ways to reconcile the traditional, formal face-to-face model of education and modern,informal, multi-media type of education. Realizing the advantages of blended learning and becomingfully aware of the necessity of modernization and internationalization of their curricula, universitiesaround the world have devoted considerable time to designing and developing courses in blendedformat via e-learning platforms (usually free e-learning solutions, such as Moodle). Thus createdmultimedia digital environment is, we believe, particularly suitable for teaching and learning foreignlanguages.The Faculty of Philology embraced the concept of blended learning and introduced it at all levels ofstudy by installing and customizing the Moodle learning management system. This open sourceplatform is used by our faculty in order to make news and announcements available, upload studymaterial, give assignments and tests to our students, as well as to grade them. What we wanted toachieve throughout our blended type of courses is to give philology students autonomy in learningforeign languages, as they can adjust the content available via Moodle platform to the objectives theywant to attain before completing their studies. Hence, we offer various contents that we believerelevant, and provide the freedom of choice to our students to deal with subject matter that is mostappealing to them in the context of courses they are attending during a particular semester. Takinginto account different needs of our students, we believe that we have created blended type of learningthat will enable them to use the time they intended to devote to learning foreign languages in the mostoptimal way.We will pay particular attention to the courses offered in blended format within our PhD studyprogramme Language, Literature, Culture. Our intention is to analyze the way they were created anddeveloped, study materials and topics offered as additional and optional, as well as to explain theprocess of students' assessment. We will emphasize a number of advantages of blended learningwithin the university framework and offer some of the best practices for teaching in multimediaenvironment. Also, as we are now witnessing the emergence of digital (smart) classrooms in Serbia,and therefore the introduction of electronic boards and textbooks, we strive to train future teachers offoreign languages to use digital tools as much as possible in classrooms, by showing them, on theexample of our blended type of courses, how exactly they can be applied in the process of teaching.